Erik Nordman - The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom: Essential Lessons for Collective Action

I first learned of Dr. Elinor Ostroms Nobel-prize-winning research on environmental management when I was a graduate student in upstate New York. However, it took a trip to a Nairobi shopping mall for me to really understand it.

My family and I were living in Kenya while I worked as a visiting professor at Kenyatta University. Nairobi is famous for its chaotic traffic so we relied on a taxi driver, James Waithaka, for most of our car trips. While driving me to a lunch meeting at one Nairobis many upscale malls, Waithaka said that hed drop me off at the front entrance, but he would park at the far end of the lot to wait for me.

I asked Waithaka why he would not be waiting in the taxi lot right in front of the mall. He explained that that lot was unofficially reserved for drivers who are part of the taxi collective. Customers can request a taxi as they leave the mall. The taxi collective determines who gets to drive the next customer, and the drivers agree to charge the same rates. Many of the Nairobi malls had such an informal arrangement. Waithaka, not being a member of the collective, had to wait elsewhere. He also was not interested in picking up another customer because he was going to wait for me.

As a professor of natural resources management, I immediately recognized this as a commons. Commons, or as Ostrom called them, common-pool resources, are goods that can be depleted if overused but are also difficult to exclude people from using. The conventional wisdom held that resources like the common pastures of old-time, agrarian villages would be overgrazed if all residents were allowed to bring as many animals to the pasture as they wished. In this case, taxi drivers from all over Nairobi would have clogged the shopping malls lots. Too many drivers would have chased too few customers. The drivers would have lowered their rates to unsustainable levels in a competition to lure customers. They would have, in effect, overgrazed and degraded the taxi commons and made all of the drivers worse off.

But the taxi drivers did not succumb to this fate. They organized and determined which drivers were in the taxi collective and which were out. They developed rules to determine who gets the next customer. They set physical boundaries where the rules apply and where drivers like Waithaka, who bring their own customers, can wait quietly. And they doled out punishments to those who broke the rules (not all of which were legal). They did this with the tacit approval of the mall owners and law enforcement. The taxi drivers, through years of trial and error, figured out a way to sustainably manage their flow of customers. Each taxi driver has enough customers to earn a living. And they did it on their own.

As Waithaka told me all of this, I recalled the work of Elinor Ostrom. As a professor at Indiana University, Ostrom studied resource-using communities around the world. She found that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, communities can work together to manage their resources without degrading them. These arrangements can be messy and complicated, but they also can be effective. Communities are not relegated to the fate of overusing their commons. And these taxi drivers were yet another example.